The Gardener and the Black Hole Weekend Series No.

The Gardener and the Black Hole
Weekend Series No. 3: Justin Tkatchenko, MP for Moresby South, Minister for Foreign Affairs

by PAUL L. KEBAIJA

Between the Hilton tower, the convention centre and the apartment block at Star Mountain Plaza in Port Moresby there are manicured gardens holding more than twelve thousand plants drawn from every corner of Papua New Guinea. They were laid out in time for the 2018 APEC leaders' summit.

According to Star Mountain Plaza's own published material, many of those plants were supplied by PNG Gardener, the landscaping business belonging to Justin Tkatchenko, who was at the time the Minister responsible for APEC.

We put that on the record as a question, not a finding, and we have put it to the Minister: did PNG Gardener hold a contract in connection with Star Mountain Plaza; was it tendered; did Mr Tkatchenko own the company at the time; and was the interest disclosed in his annual statement to the Ombudsman Commission? Those are the four questions section 27 of the Constitution exists to answer, and none of them has ever been asked in public. They matter because of what sits underneath the gardens.

K100 million into a hole nobody audits

Star Mountain Plaza is entirely Papua New Guinean owned. It was built with landowner royalties from three mineral and petroleum projects, plus K100 million of taxpayers' money contributed by the State for a twenty per cent stake.

(Star Mountains Plaza Limited, which owns the whole complex and is managed by the State-owned Mineral Resources Development Company, has filed only three annual returns in its history, for 2013, 2014 and 2015, all declaring nil assets, nil liabilities and nil employees. Nothing has been filed since construction began. Together with the three landowner trustee companies holding eighty per cent of its shares, it has failed to lodge its twenty-four most recent annual returns and audited accounts.

The remaining shareholder, APEC Infrastructure & Investment Company Limited, was issued a twenty per cent stake in July 2017 ten months before it existed under that name. Its only filed return, for 2020, described the company as insolvent and its principal business as oil and gas. It has never appeared in the Auditor-General's annual audits of government-owned companies.
The Auditor-General's April 2021 special report on APEC expenditure did flag as a significant concern that US$30 million, K100 million, paid by the State through Kumul Petroleum Holdings towards constructing the Hilton was not disclosed in the APEC Authority's financial reports.
When MRDC was asked to explain the missing returns, it was told the company would first require the journalists to sign a non-disclosure agreement.
This is the environment in which the Minister for APEC's private landscaping company appears, on the developer's own account, as a supplier.

The cars

In October 2018, weeks out from the summit, it emerged that PNG had imported forty Maserati Quattroporte sedans. The cost was around US$6.5 million, K20 million. Three Bentley Flying Spurs followed. Tkatchenko gave the country three different accounts in the space of a few weeks, abandoning each as documents surfaced.
First, in a signed media statement, he said the vehicles were being paid for by the private sector, at no overall cost to the State". Then an invoice emerged showing the cars had been ordered through a Sri Lankan vehicle servicing and repair company and paid for by the PNG taxpayer, an invoice the government has never disputed. He then told News Corp that a deposit had of course been paid to get the vehicles into the country.

Finally he confirmed the government had paid the full cost, and the airfreight, upfront, while maintaining the money would be entirely recovered and that the cars were selling fast.

They were not. The vehicles were not offered for public sale until months after the summit. Seven months on, the Finance Department reported that one Maserati and one Bentley had been sold; one Bentley had been gifted to the Governor-General. The tenders, Tkatchenko said, had been issued wrongly, so the objective of recouping the funds had not been achieved. Two years after the summit the cars were still in a warehouse.

Thirty-eight of the forty Maseratis remained undisposed of, and the completed audit put the total cost of staging APEC at just under K600 million. By 2021 the Finance Minister was offering the unsold cars to PNG's overseas missions. The Finance Secretary separately confirmed that Land Cruisers, ambulances, buses and fire engines donated by Japan and China for the summit could not be accounted for.

Sir Mekere Morauta, a former Prime Minister, put roughly K33 million of public money into the vehicle purchase without due process, said the information gathered indicated a strong likelihood that the Leadership Code, the Constitution and the Criminal Code had been breached, and called for a full independent inquiry into APEC spending. No such inquiry was held. The APEC report Tkatchenko repeatedly promised to table in Parliament was never delivered.

Durand Farm: the clean-up that was announced

Not everything in this file runs against him, and we say so.
In December 2019, as Minister for Housing and Urban Development, Tkatchenko said the Durand Farm housing project had achieved nothing and that the Prime Minister had directed him to clean up the National Housing Corporation. Acting on State Solicitor advice that no public tenders had been called and the contractor engagements were therefore null and void, he cancelled contracts held by five companies. He alleged that one of them, Chinese-owned, had used asbestos in houses it built.

Two of the five were tied to senior figures: one to Labi Amaiu, the former Member for Moresby North East in whose electorate Durand Farm sits and who had been committed to trial over the alleged illegal transfer of 301 Durand Farm titles worth K24 million; another to Don Sawong, at the relevant time a sitting Supreme Court judge. Cancelling those contracts was the right call. The question is what came after it.

There is no public record of any referral to the police Fraud Directorate or the Ombudsman Commission arising from a State Solicitor finding that major public contracts were awarded unlawfully. There is no public record of the asbestos allegation being investigated by any health or building authority. And the houses at Durand Farm remain, so far as the public record shows, unbuilt. An announcement is not a clean-up. Seven years on, the Minister who made it has never been asked what followed.

London, and what an inquiry looks like when it isn't one

In May 2023 PNG sent around thirty people to the coronation of King Charles III, by a wide margin the largest Pacific delegation, against three from Solomon Islands. Each delegate carried a K50,000 allowance. Estimates put the London cost near US$900,000, with a similar sum spent on a public event in Port Moresby around the telecast.

What ended his ministry was not the money. It was his description of his critics as primitive animals while defending his daughter, a private law student who was subjected to an ugly public pile-on and to whom the Prime Minister later apologised. The Leader of the Opposition asked the Ombudsman Commission to investigate; a negative finding under the Leadership Code would have cost Tkatchenko his seat. Ordinary citizens filed their own complaints about the delegation's spending.

On 15 May 2023 the Commission met him and reminded him of his duties under section 27, that a leader's first responsibility is to the people he represents, and that loyalty to the office must override self-interest. No referral. No tribunal. He was reappointed Foreign Minister on 18 January 2024 and holds the portfolio today.

The question nobody in PNG has answered

Justin Tkatchenko was born in Melbourne in 1972 and holds both Australian and Papua New Guinean citizenship. He has sat in the National Parliament since 2012. Papua New Guinea did not permit dual citizenship until Constitutional Amendment No. 43 and the Citizenship (Amendment) Act in 2016. Australia is one of eight prescribed countries under that regime, and PNG citizens must apply for approval to hold dual citizenship. Before 2016, naturalisation required renunciation of any other citizenship and a Declaration of Loyalty.

Belden Namah, chairing the Parliamentary Committee on Foreign Affairs, publicly demanded in 2023 that Tkatchenko either renounce his citizenship or have it revoked. Nobody in authority took up the question, and it remains unanswered: when did he acquire PNG citizenship, did he renounce Australian citizenship as the law then required, and if he holds both today, when was that approved?

There is a related and simpler question. The Minister's family owns substantial property in Brisbane, a Brookfield acreage bought in 2015 for A$1.77 million and a house at Fig Tree Pocket valued around A$1.1 million, the subject of a long planning dispute with Brisbane City Council.

There is nothing unlawful about a Papua New Guinean leader owning property abroad. The Leadership Code question is whether it was declared. Section 27 and the Organic Law on the Duties and Responsibilities of Leadership require leaders to disclose their assets, including those held overseas and by a spouse, in annual statements to the Ombudsman Commission.
We have asked the Commission whether those statements disclose it. We will publish the answer.

The pattern

Justin Tkatchenko has never been the subject of an adverse finding by a court, a commission of inquiry or the Ombudsman Commission, and it would be dishonest to suggest otherwise.
But look at what has accumulated. A K600 million event with an APEC report promised to Parliament and never delivered. A K100 million State investment in a hotel complex whose owners have not filed twenty-four annual returns and whose managers ask journalists to sign non-disclosure agreements. A K20 million car purchase explained three different ways and recovered almost not at all. A housing clean-up announced and then, apparently, dropped. A K3 million delegation answered with a meeting and a reminder. And a citizenship question raised in Parliament by a government MP that nobody has ever resolved.

In every case the machinery of accountability produced an announcement rather than a conclusion.

In 2027 the voters of Moresby South will be asked to renew a mandate for a fourth term. This is what they will be renewing it against.

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*Mr Tkatchenko has denied wrongdoing in relation to the APEC vehicle purchases and has never been the subject of any adverse finding by a court, commission of inquiry or the Ombudsman Commission. This publication has written to his office with the questions raised above and will publish any response in full.*